I'm just curious to know if there's any T3D developers who'd like to collaborate on a undecided game project. There's nothing official about it, I'm just exploring the possibility to work with other developers. Last year, I took a game development break to refine my modelling skills since I never found a serious modeller who don't dissappear after few weeks and my plan was to get back at game development at start of 2016. For the last few weeks, I have been slowly preparing myself and tried to motivate some peoples that I'm suppose to make games with but I don't see any motivations from them...

Type of game I'm looking forAnyway, I'm currently thinking about different prototypes/ideas I have and I'm trying to figure which one I will use for my next game development attempt. I have been working mostly alone since I started learning T3D and I tought that I have nothing to loose to post about it and maybe catch the interest of a serious T3D developer wanting to make a game.I have no particular preference for the type of game I would develop but I have a list of limitations after previous game development attempts. (Mostly from my Boost! experience ). Well, it's not a complete list but here's the 3 main "limitations":

No direct multiplayer - It make it complicated to organize testing and providing support. Then after release, you have to continuously provide support and fix exploits...

No realism or competing with AAA games - I want a simple indie project with a nice and simple artistic style

No open source game (Talking about the anyone can contribute type.) Could be a free game with some PayToPlay stuff)

About meNow a little about me... First, I'm a french canadian from Montreal area so don't expect perfect english from me. Over the years I learnt every aspect of game development but I'm not an expert in all of them. My speciality is definitly scripting, I'm getting quite good with low-poly modelling(3ds max) and texturizing (Photoshop/Substance Designer), I'm also good for general 2D arts with Photoshop. I'm not a skilled C++ coder but I know how to adapt the T3D code for my needs in most area. I can also develop nice websites using Joomla or anything PHP/MySQL related. The area where I'm not very good is writting and documenting.

T3D Projects experienceFor those who don't know me, I'm working on a enhanced T3D editor called TorqueLab, you can see a bunch of video on my youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGR60u ... _-Q/videos . I have never completed a game but 2 years ago I worked "alone" on a racing game called Boost!. I don't have somekind of Portofolio showing past works but for the last 2-3 months, I'm working on levels for an old project called Dark Territory which I have no intention to develop it as a game (for now at least), I simply want to have something to show in case a good offer come.

What I'm looking for? Well I'm looking for serious developers who are quite skilled in some aspects(3D, 2D, Coding, Writing, etc). Ideally, a very good programmer or someone with strong writing skills (Game design documents, documentation, etc). I'm not looking for beginners even if highly motivated, I have lost enough time trying help new game developers trying to get motivated...

Anyway, nothing official here like I said so you have nothing to loose by asking. I will be carefull because in the past, I got easily excited with possible collaborator to realize shortly after that it wasn't the type of person I needed. Also, even if you are not sure about the idea, we could simply investigate possible game ideas with no engagements. Also, I do have an unrelated 40hours/weeks job so I can't be working on games all days but almost 100% of my free time go in game development stuff.

Ok, That's it for now! I might post a more specific "looking for help" in the incoming weeks once I decided what would be my next game development attempt.

I would not hope for help for a non existing project. In your case I would focus on making a prototype and then just buy art or an artist to finish it up. T3D developers are very very rare, but art you can get anywhere.

Duion wrote:I would not hope for help for a non existing project. In your case I would focus on making a prototype and then just buy art or an artist to finish it up. T3D developers are very very rare, but art you can get anywhere.

Yeah, I have to agree with that, mostly the fact that T3D Developers are very rare. Anyway, I was not looking for help specifically but more for peoples with who I could team up to develop a long term game development relationship. (and make games ).

Also, I should avoid that kind of posts written on the fly but on another hand, it made me think about the future and it's a good thing. I tought about closing/deleting the post first thing this morning but I might keep it there and see what feedback I get. I couldn't get back asleep because I kept thinking about my previous failed collaboration and I can't let that repeat again. Working on a game with no budget is something that can't be really done with a random team, I think it need to be with peoples you already know well and know what to expect.

I should rather focus on helping this community making Torque3D better, I don't think T3D have the credit it should have... It's a great engine for those liking freedom and scripting, it's just need some better tools to get back closer of other engine and It's where I should collaborate with others.

Also, I think it already have been discussed, but it could be nice to have some nice little demos of different genres to offer with the engine. I'm not trying to start a discussion about it here, just saying that It could be something on what I could contribute in the future.

So, I keep the post intact but I understand that it's very unlikely to find what I'm looking for now and here. My initial expectation were quite low but I tought I had nothing to loose... It's just that I became a bit frustrated about my supposed "partners" who always promish everything and never deliver...

My advice would be that you should not focus on making Torque3D better or build demos for it, there may be nobody to use it and make real games, so go straight for making a prototype of your own game, everything else is wasted time.But first you should clean up your TorqueLab features so it is useable of course

Mud-H, since we're throwing caution to the wind and talking about things that we're not really prepared to talk about formally yet... do you have a moment to talk about openSimEarth?

I'm sure you've seen my various postings on the project here recently, but I have yet to make an official public announcement about it yet, due to the fact that it still lacks the basic tier of gameplay elements I'm hoping to include right out of the gate. However, since you seem to be in a long term search for T3D collaborators, without being locked into a specific game you're trying to make, it seems that perhaps you might be fair game...

Basically, the giant mouthful I've bitten off here can be described in a nutshell like this: I'm a game developer who really can't be tied down to spending years and years only to make one game, that will subsequently be discarded onto the trash heap of history when I ultimately start working on the next game. I got into working for Garage Games on the basic engine technology because I would rather put my time toward tools to make games, instead of toward a particular single game.

However, I've now come to a place where I want to assemble many more high level game components that do not belong in the engine itself, but IMHO are common enough that they also should not have to be recreated every time for each individual T3D game. This will sound familiar, of course, because we've tossed around the idea of "starter packs" or "genre kits" for years. However, I'm taking a slightly different course with this.

First, I'm only interested in assembling content that makes sense within a virtual Earth environment (although historical or futuristic scenarios are in scope), so I would like to assemble all kinds of first person shooter and realtime strategy logic, as well as wildlife simulation, weather modeling, farming, and also flight simulation, wheeled vehicle simulation, and many, many other potentially interesting bits of sim logic. But I am not particularly interested in dungeon crawlers, space games, or many other genres that do not fall within the (already enormous) scope I've settled on.

Second, while the scope of the project appears insanely huge, if you've followed any of my blogs or posts you will know that the magic ticket for making it reasonable is FlightGear - I'm creating an unholy bastard child of Torque and FlightGear, with the result that I already have a complete world map (albeit low resolution, it's meant to be a sandbox rather than a finished simEarth), and I already have a vast array of extremely realistic flying vehicles available to me.

Third, my largest area of professional expertise in game programming involves playing with PhysX, and I intend to use it for wheeled vehicles, in addition to ragdolls and many other things.

My goal is to make an environment that will bring new users much, much closer to being able to make their own games, just by picking a location on the planet, shuffling the parts of openSimEarth around, and picking the features they want. I'd like it to cross into the zone where "making a game" with openSimEarth is more like making a game in Second Life, where you don't have to finish it and publish it as much as just make your content available to other users of openSimEarth. I'm ultimately envisioning running my own servers, but before that to allow people to run head to head multiplayer at home or set up their own dedicated servers. My goal is more to create a gaming/simulation ecosystem than to create a particular game or app.

So anyway, I don't want to hijack your thread too far here, but although this plan may sound farfetched, I've already completed or at least significantly started all of the most technically challenging components on my list. I have a lot of optimization to do, and a lot of art time, and scripting logic, but I'm quite confident that everything I'm discussing here is very much achievable. And re: the problem of fly by night wannabe developers, I have recently taken a new contract programming position for which I specifically required a half time schedule, so that I would actually be able to spend whole days working on this. I am very committed to finishing it.

If you, or anyone else in the community reading this, is interested in helping in any way with this project, please let me know, I'll be here!

Last edited by chriscalef on Wed Jan 13, 2016 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Duion wrote:My advice would be that you should not focus on making Torque3D better or build demos for it, there may be nobody to use it and make real games, so go straight for making a prototype of your own game, everything else is wasted time.

Well my primary goal is to make better tools for my use but that I also want to share. Last year I also expand my Prototyper "Gamelab" which allow me to quickly create a prototype of any genres from the same build. So instead of having 3-4 projects for different prototypes and copying scripts between those, I simply run a single project and can switch prototype without leaving. I will try to record a little demonstration video because I'm quite proud of it but again it's built for me so not ready to be shared.To set a prototype, you simply edit a cfg file and assign the core game mode and the needed modules.

Mud-H, since we're throwing caution to the wind and talking about things that we're not really prepared to talk about formally yet... do you have a moment to talk about openSimEarth?

Yes I have been reading your posts and I was never sure what OpenSimEarth was really about. It sound like something I would like to learn more and maybe help a bit where I can. Few years ago, I was working on a WWII EnemyTerritory Mod project and I worked a level based on a D-Day town called Vierville. I spent so much time working on it that I feel like I already been there. Few months ago, I gave a try to redo the maps using some realworld data that wasn't available 10 years ago but I decided to put an hold on it since I had to learn new stuff and I was already overwhelmed. Then I decided to work unrelatic RTCW/ET style levels instead.

Anyway, each time I saw your project, I was wondering if it's something that could help making a level based on real location. Like I said I don't know much about your project but I assumed that it take real world data to generate terrain, forest, roads, etc... Is it something like that?I'm interested to discuss a bit about your project and see if I could find something that I could help with and that I could use for future projects. I guess we should use messaging to start and see where it goes, but like I said in previous post, I have stepped back a bit about the intention of my original post so no promish here but I definitly want to learn more about the goal behind OpenSimEarth.

Hey, no worries about making promises or anything, I'm just throwing feelers out there. But yeah, projects like your D-Day beach are *exactly* what I envision openSimEarth being used for!

But before I forget, I had an aside to @

Duion, since he showed up here: I guess the whole point of open source is that legally I don't even need to ask, but I'd like to ask your permission anyway: would you mind if I borrowed art or code content from Ubergame to use in openSimEarth? I wouldn't want to steal your thunder, and would certainly reference Ubergame as a source, but you've done a lot of awesome work over there! Same goes in reverse, of course, for anything I've published so far under openSimEarth - it's all free on my github.

Now, back to your questions. And re: messaging, feel free to message me anytime, but for general descriptions of the openSimEarth project, I might as leave them public, I have every interest in more people reading about it! (I will move all this to my own thread at some point, but I'm still practicing my pitch, so I hope you don't mind if I practice on you.)

I assumed that it take real world data to generate terrain, forest, roads, etc... Is it something like that?

Yes, it is exactly like that. While it is easy enough to import a heightmap into Torque and start painting textures on it and distributing models, my goal is to make a baseline textured terrain available for the entire planet, so the average user can just go there and start walking around without doing any development work at all.

What makes this possible, of course, is FlightGear. I have designed a simple network protocol based on a class I called dataSource, and I use this class to facilitate communication of terrain data and dynamic skybox images from FlightGear to Torque. (I know, I could have / should have downloaded a networking library, but I couldn't find one lightweight enough, easy enough to learn, with a liberal enough open source license, so I just wrote my own and it only took a few days, so hate away, haters!)

What this gives me is a very, very low resolution terrain, which is textured with a very broad brush according to GIS data assembled by the FlightGear terrain team. To be perfectly honest, it looks terrible from a first person perspective when you just use it as is, but it is a starting point, and you can literally go anywhere in the entire world, so there is that.

To raise the quality level in particular areas, though, FlightGear provides a full set of command line terrain generation tools, called TerraGear, as well as a GUI to ease the process of using them. (It's still pretty complicated, however.) Using these tools, and downloading your own data, you can fairly easily replace any given area of flightgear terrain with much better terrain. You can also feed them your own GIS data to provide higher resolution, or historical or fictional, map data.

On the Torque end of things, I've written a terrain pager class which first checks to see if we have terrains already created before asking FG to make any more. This way, I'm envisioning developers running the connection to FG as a one time thing, creating all their terrains, and then distributing them so that users won't have to deal with the FG connection at all. At the same time, though, I'm of course trying to make the FG connection more efficient and more invisible, so that people can use it all the time without noticing. Right now it's very slow and very noticeable, but I've done some very stupid things that I haven't had time to go back and fix yet, so there is a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of optimization.

Anyway, in Torque, I'm treating the terrain textures received from FlightGear as landcover suggestions, and using them to potentially pick from an array of Torque textures, as well as make choices about tree and grass cover. As an example, where in FlightGear I might have a single forest texture, in Torque I would use that to choose from a set of different ground textures, as well as applying trees and ground covers from specific sets, via predefined rules. (A lot of this is aspirational at the moment, but just starting to work. Much more to be done.)

In addition to terrain textures, I've written an OpenStreetMap XML reader that does a decent job of sucking in streetmaps and reproducing them as decal or mesh roads in Torque. (All of this stored in an sqlite database.) In addition, I've set up the World Editor to save TSStatics to the database instead of to the mission file, and then hooked them up to page in and out as the player moves. In this way it should be possible for users to run around and design anything they want, and simply by sharing the database with friends they will be able to reproduce their creations.

Sorry for going on and on, but the last important point here is that ultimately I am really hoping to use this project for real world applications and not only for entertainment. I will leave that to your imagination for now.

EDIT: Oh yeah, before I forget: the unfortunate point that makes this whole project vaporware at the moment is the fact that I still need to do a massive data reducing job on the gig or more of FlightGear data that you currently need to have to run the program. I guess I could just hand out my modified executable and make people download the whole FG data repository, but I'd really prefer to release a local-to-my-region build that would get people started using it without requiring the full world textures download. Maybe bandwidth and hard drives being what they are today, though, I shouldn't even worry about it...

Yes, my stuff is all free to use, there is no need to ask. The art is CC0 and has no conditions and for the code I have no idea yet, I did not add a copyright header myself, since I don't want to make the MIT license worse by adding additional headers that never can be removed because of the license conditions. I also did not write that many features myself, in many of them I had more or less help from others, so I did not feel well in adding my copyright to them.

Well your OpenSimEarth project seem quite interesting more than I hear about it. Your previous posts have always catch my attention but I was quite busy and in some kind of game development break phase.I will have a look at your GitHub repositories and see what I can find there. I understand about FlightGear sizing issues but is there a way to test OpenSimEarth as a FPS game? I guess I will find out by looking at your repository. Also, like you said, further discussion on the subject should be moved to an OpenSimEarth thread.